Angry Sascha is angry.

I think Terry Pratchett said it best when rhapsodising on the “injustice of the boot”: People who require good shoes for their job often can’t afford The Best™ and need to buy a new pair each and every year. And those who are better-off usually don’t need boots this sturdy, as their soles mostly grace carpeted floors. But shelling out 10x as much, one time, can tide them over until the grave. That is, with one pair of boots. In the end, well, ending up having spent less on shoes than those who can’t afford proper shoes, but would be perfectly served with the best the market provides.

Much the same can be said about photography. But for some reason many hobbyists – in above metaphor the carpet grinders who are not really dependent on their tools – choose to buy cheap, repeatedly, again and again. Even though they would have saved lots of moolah if they just went with what they really wanted to begin with. Not what they needed, as hobbyists are beyond such petty concerns. Still, in dilettante photography, burning money seems more common than thinking about what one’s after, and then going for it, within reason.

This has to stop. Seriously.

Dudes and dudettes, you’re indulging in a hobby. It doesn’t matter whether you can write off your gear when doing your tax returns. It doesn’t matter if you can justify the expense to anybody other than yourself. It’s your hobby, and you obviously have the funds: Otherwise you couldn’t replace camera bodies once a year or shell out a grand for a speciality lens you’ll use three to four times before storing it in The Closet. Next to all that other gear you procured on a whim and never use again after your great-aunt’s 80th birthday party.

You know you enjoy photography. You also know what you’d really like as a tool to this end. Still, you start with compacts, bridges, then a crop camera. Then another, better one, with higher ISO or faster auto-focus. You invest thousands of quids in lenses for said cameras – while in the back of your head there’s this tiny voice screaming about full-frame or middle format or whatever. But 6k sound too expensive, not reasonable.

So you settle for camera bodies for € 1.000, a couple of lenses for another couple of thou, and yet a refresh of the same body every couple of months/years. If you’re really into photography, it will take you about one year to spend more on gear you don’t really enjoy – rather than biting the bullet and going with your dream to begin with. Even if this means you’ll need to save up for it.

Is it GAS? Perhaps. Maybe gear acquisition syndrome is what drives Canikosonic camera sales. You’re enjoying shopping for The Best Bang for the Buck™ more than rationally looking at the numbers and accepting you’ll end up with The Best no Current Expense Spared™ in the end anyhow. It‘s the new shiny toys that drive you, and you rationalise the expense by telling yourself: This will make my photography easier / better / whatever, and it’s a reasonable upgrade. Again and again, again and again.

Remember, it’s your hobby, it’s a dream, something to indulge in because you can afford it, both money- and time-wise. Otherwise you collected stamps or dried horse manure or something. Buying boots each year, for many years, rather than getting that one pair that will serve you a lifetime is not sane behaviour for a dilettante. It’s often a necessity for a professional, but please – you’re not. So for bugger’s sake stop this nonsense, for your own sake and peace of mind of your spouse.

On the other hand, this makes the after-market more interesting for those who know what they want or need. Hrm. The jury’s still out on that one.

One would think that Switzerland’s orderly and somewhat overly clean society made it easy to be A Rebel: Just do the opposite from what signs and common sense tell you to do. In reality though, the Swiss find it exceedingly hard to disobey orders, both direct and inherent ones. Not because they were a particularly bland type of sheeple, but because most of them rules seem sensible inside the bounds of social contract.

So we’re lost, our puny attempts at anarchy stop short of using the wrong fork at a gala dinner. Thank goodness I’ve had the opportunity to observe a selection of touristes étrangers while staying at hotels up in the Alps. As a service to my readers, I’ll share what I learned re: proper misdemeanor.

1. Driving on the right is for wimps. Make sure to steer your Humvee clear of any street guides and use the middle of the road only, especially if it’s one of them curvy, narrow mountain pass roads leading to the resort.
2. Assume everybody on hotel grounds not only understands but also speaks your particularly weird Flander dialect. Get riled up at noticing this ain’t so.
3. Variant: Assume no-one in Switzerland speaks English, French, or Italian, and crack rassist jokes at the top of your voice.
4. It might be a pool shared by all lodgers, but you’re in love! So boink your significant other as much as your loins permit.
5. Bonus points if you use the kids’ inflatable banana float while doing so.
6. A propos pool area: If there’s a single shower next to the pool – to cool off prior to jumping in – and more showers in the changing rooms settle for the former to do your weekly body scrub. Take your time.
7. Cigar butts decompose easily stuck into lobby flower pots. No need for trash cans or, Gods forbid! ash trays.

I hope this short list will become helpful once you decide life’s too old and boring. Kant’s a cunt anyway, so forget about the Golden Rule and just be yourself. Everybody else will look up to you as a prime example of human egotism self-expression. And what’s a bit of love juice between friends?

The best way to deal with your driving anxiety is choosing the passage over the mountains rather than the tunnel road. People race through tunnels, a passage is far more relaxed and quaint.

Never mind pass roads still are considered highways here in Switzerland. Thus there’s both a lower and upper speed limit, the latter the same as many tunnels’, i.e. 80 km/h. Hey, you’re 68 years old, live in the hilly Canton of Nidwalden, and you have half a century of driving panic under your rather taut belt. Neither serpentine corners – secured by flimsy posts marking the divide between the road and a 300 meters drop – nor irate bus drivers tied to a schedule which doesn’t allow for forty kilometers at 20 mph, nor possibly intoxicated tourists riding their BMW race bikes will make things worse. Will they?

Call it confrontation therapy if you may.

For maximum therapeutic effect, never use one of the abundant sightseeing platforms to swerve off the main road, letting them two dozen irritated drivers behind you pass. It’s passage, not pass, after all.

Also, constant driving speed is overrated, especially on roads where cows might stumble onto your path. The cue of drivers behind you won’t mind to adjust their driving speed by plus/minus 20 km/h to your insecurity and every whim. No, never. What a novel idea.

For Chrissakes.

So this is it. Early adopter, inofficial evangelist, part-time photographer is dropping Lightroom. Rather, deleting it from his workstations.

Who the eff cares? Well, I do, as I am abovementioned former inofficial evangelist. And I wonder what the bloody hell I was thinking. Hindsight is both gift and curse.

What Adobe did with Lightroom, if you stay objective:

• More features. Some direly needed (like, support for your camera?), others more, like, what the hells? Yeah, I’m looking at you, Social Media Upload and Comments Download.
• Selling said features as USPs to justify the hefty price-tag on upgrades. By now I’ve spent more than 400 quid on Lightroom, it’s upgrades, and plug-ins necessary until Adobe deemed stuff like output sharpening important enough for yet another full-price upgrade.
• LR3 is slower and more cumbersome to use than LR2. But it has the better RAW render engine (which you can’t retrofit into LR2), so please upgrade, yes?
• Said RAW render engine is identical to the one used in the current release of Photoshop Elements, which you can get bundled with your next scanner for free.
• Also, depending on the cameras used, the engine is inferior to competitors’ or even open source solutions. In some cases (Leica M series comes to mind), it should be featured in Webster’s, under “What the flying fuck”.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the Lightroom concept, I’m pretty happy with most of its results, it’s stable like a rock, and I’m used to the way it works (see above evangelist thing). But bloody hells, Flash galleries? Bug-fixing your RAW rendering engine equals a full-price upgrade? Support for fresh RAW formats one year from now = buy our upgrade? Even though the whole difference is in camera identification in the RAW header?

Lightroom was my favourite as it streamlined workflow issues. But: It’s becoming more and more muddled and complicated to use, while it doesn’t ensure plug-ins won’t crash the whole application just because they are coded poorly. I still find things I wrote off as “well, it’s a new application, you can’t expect that just yet” in 2006 that actually had been there from the beginning – but weren’t obvious or easily accessible. The worst thing for a workflow app is to hide things that might seriously influence or even change the way you look at your current, well, workflow.

It’s just sad. So much potential. Oh, well.

Well, almost four (4) years later, one major publication got wind of font rendering issues in Adobe products. That is, if you want to work with OS X-generated documents using Postscript-flavored OpenType fonts inside Adobe’s world domination scheme aka PDF.

Does this change anything? Probably not. But at least I don’t look like a total crank anymore. Lonely and unloved, boozing too much while getting riled up on things 99.999% of the local populace doesn’t care a flying fuck about. While my customers do. Yours too, probably, otherwise you wouldn’t read this.

You rock, Adobe!